I love music, but I am really bad about keeping up with new stuff.  My iTunes library is only so-so, so I spend most of my time listening to playlists on 8tracks.  This is good for variety, and great for finding the right background music for a BBQ or party, but there’s something missing: my friends.

I have a few friends who have great taste in music, and who are totally on top of what’s new and good.  As it works now, every once in a while I’ll get a recommendation from one of them, I’ll buy the album on Amazon, and then I’ll listen to it non-stop for a few weeks.  It’s great when it happens, but it doesn’t happen that often.  I want something more automated and frequent.

A few of these friends publish their music on the web (see Piecemaker and My Brooklyn is Better).  Problem is, they each use different platforms to publish, and as far as I can tell, there’s not a great way to combine these into one stream.  Piecemaker uses WordPress and outputs a standard podcast feed, and My Brooklyn is Better uses Tumblr, which embeds a flash player and forbids linking directly to the audio file.  I’m sure I have other friends who are publishing on platforms (Last.fm, 8tracks, Facebook?) that I don’t know about yet).

So, what I want is a way to take these streams, regardless of platform or format, and create a mixed feed or webpage.  I don’t care about actually downloading the music; I just want to be able to listen on the web, keep track of the ones I like, and have the option to buy the albums later.

I’m sure this is possible using some combination of tools that are already out there.  For starters, I’m playing around with Yahoo Pipes to see if I can mash something up to my liking, with an eye towards playing it on the web using StreamPad.  We’ll see if that works.  But is there something out there that I’m missing that already does this in a more straightforward way?  Seems like there must be, but I haven’t found it yet.